The Story Trance

The cinema audience sits almost immobile as they watch the movie. From time to time, someone makes a comment to a neighbour, or reaches into a popcorn bag, but, if the movie is any good, people are staring, entranced, barely aware of the passage of time. That’s the experience they’ve paid for. That’s the story trance.

Why the fascination? What good does it do us?

Historian Yuval Noah Harari has a fascinating take on this question. He wrote Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind ¹Yuval Noah Harari, A Brief History of Humankind (Signal Books, 2014), 20–39. It’s a book packed with remarkable ideas, but one of the most interesting is that our connection with stories is central to human evolution.

Our closest animal relative is the chimpanzee. Chimps live in fairly small groups, mostly extended family. Perhaps twenty or thirty individuals in total. They groom each other and recognize each other. As the group grows, it become unstable, and eventually a big group will divide into smaller groups, living apart. There will still be some back-and-forth between groups, but if chimpanzees ever come across a chimpanzee they don’t recognize, they’re likely to attack and kill the stranger.

Early humans probably behaved in the same way, living in extended families, with some interaction between nearby groups. However, as we developed the ability to speak, we found new ways to connect. I might not know you, and I might not recognize you, but if we speak the same language, you can explain who you are. If I discover that we are connected to the same people, I may consider you a friend, despite the fact that we’ve never met.

“So who are you exactly?”

“My name’s Zang. I’m the son of Losh and the brother of Vorn Crab-Hand.”

“Vorn Crab-Hand! I know him! He’s amazing! Come in. Sit down. Have a cup of ox-blood.”

This gossip-based connection allows much larger social groups. Some psychologists estimate we can keep track of about 150 people this way, so humans whose brains were good at gossip could form much larger stable groups than those who weren’t inclined that way.

Imagine one group of humans connected by gossip, and another group connected as an extended family. If these groups fight, it might be 150 individuals against 20. The smaller group will be massacred. So there’s a powerful evolutionary advantage to gossip. This kind of connection is still going strong, and it’s the basis for one of the internet’s biggest success stories, Facebook.

Gossip allows larger social groups, but its influence is still limited by our ability to remember names and faces. To create larger groups, we need a different social glue. Shared stories.

“Stop! Who travels in the valley of the Weasel Clan?”

“My name’s Zang, son of Losh, brother of Vorn Crab-Hand.”

“Never heard of you Zang. Nobody may hunt in our land. Prepare to die.”

“First, let me offer a prayer to the sun spirit, who led me here.”

“You know about the sun spirit? We love the sun spirit. He’s the best!”

“I know! You remember the story of how he defeated Ulk, the tree god?”

“Of course! Well, this changes everything. I can’t kill a guy who is a servant of the sun spirit. Come on inside, meet the wife and kids…”

This connection through shared stories allows humans to form into groups of almost unlimited size. People who share a belief in a certain story may feel a bond even though they’re not related by blood.

Probably, long ago, some people were more taken with stories than others. Some people are fascinated by the tales of the sun spirit – they can’t hear enough about his mischievous exploits. It’s early fandom. Other people just don’t think that way. They are less interested in stories and more interested in what’s actually in front of them – pragmatists to the core. What happens if these groups fight? The pragmatists gather in a group of 150 or so, held together by bonds of family and gossip. Then the enemy arrive, all sun spirit fans, and held together by their enthusiasm for the stories they share. A group like that can easily be thousands strong. They will wipe out the pragmatists. Evolution favours enthusiasm for stories.

As Harari says, stories are not limited to religious narratives. Today we share beliefs in many things that are basically stories – constructs of the imagination. He explains that the car maker Peugeot doesn’t depend on any physical fact for its existence. It has factories and workers, but even if an enemy could destroy its factories and kill its workers, the corporation would still exist, because its existence is a social and legal fact. Peugeot is a kind of story we all believe in. The same is true of most institutions, countries, even money. Their reality derives from the fact that we all believe in them. They are a shared story – usually with a clear narrative of purpose and progress.

People will live and die for these stories.

Our commitment to these stories, and our ability to be transfixed by stories, and our tendency to believe strongly in stories is what makes our societies cohesive and powerful.

One December, when I was eleven years old, I was allowed to stay up late to see a BBC production called “A Ghost Story for Christmas.” It was a adaptation of an M.R. James ghost story, The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral. The story is about a clergyman who gets tired of waiting for the person above him to die, so he arranges a fatal accident for his superior. After he takes over his predecessor’s position, he slowly becomes aware of dark supernatural forces building up around him – noises and disturbances, all somehow related to a set of gruesome wooden carvings in the church.

What I remembered most about it was the way the tension of the story slowly increased, even though there’s very little you actually see. The horror came from the growing anticipation.

The pace of the film was very slow – probably too slow for today’s audiences – but in the 1970s it was a very effective piece of horror, and, I later discovered, quite faithful to the original story.

Many M.R. James have been adapted for TV over the years, often as BBC Christmas specials. Perhaps the best of the lot was one of the first, by comedian-turned-director Jonathan Miller. In 1968, he made a low budget version of Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad. A professor visiting the windswept coast of England finds an old bone whistle near a grave. He cleans the bone whistle and discovers a Latin inscription: “Who is it who is coming?” Then, rather foolishly, he blows the whistle… and senses that something is coming…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYjtxHHjZ00

This adaptation, which was directed by Jonathan Miller, and looks like it was made on a shoestring budget, very skillfully adapts the style of M.R. James into a TV format. The pace is deliberately slow. There’s no gore – the horror is based on mounting sense of evil.

Miller also finds other ways to build the suspense. Conversation is often faraway and indistinct. It’s the television equivalent of a campfire narrative, where the storyteller speaks more and more softly, forcing the audience to listen harder, and sensitizing them to the scare that may be coming.

Montague Rhodes James – who published as M.R. James – is widely considered one of the greatest writers of ghost stories. He was a medieval scholar, and was provost (senior administrator) at Eton College as well as Cambridge University – the height of establishment respectability. But he had some secrets, one of the biggest being that he was gay.¹Reggie Oliver, “A Warning to the Curious, A Sheaf of Criticism on M.R. James. http://www.hippocampuspress.com/warnings-to-the-curious-sheaf-of-criticism-on-m.-r.-james (In Jonathan Miller’s adaptation, there’s a suggestion that the main character’s discomfort with women is at the root of his ghostly encounter.)

M.R. James’s stories are usually about people like himself – bachelor academics, who delve too deeply in some dark matter.

James wrote a number of good tips on writing ghost stories.²M.R. James, Collected Ghost Stories, Appendix https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/j/james/mr/collect/appendix.html

He points out that ghost stories are a small, unusual genre. They seem to work best as short stories. This carries over into modern media – ghost stories seem to work well as one-off films, but, unlike detective stories, have a harder time sustaining a series.

The goal of a ghost story is to inspire “a pleasing terror in the reader.” That’s easier if the story is set somewhere familiar, and people talk in an ordinary way. You want the reader to feel that something like this might happen to them. (It’s funny to think that his characters, Edwardian professors visiting ancient sites, seemed like the most ordinary of people to the author. Today they seem a little unusual and eccentric.)

While an everyday setting was best, James believed that it was also helpful to give a ghost story a slightly old-fashioned feel, “a very slight haze of distance,” and a narrator describes events that happened a few decades ago. James himself usually tells stories with this kind of introduction. The old-fashioned style carries through to the language in his case. Although he was writing in the early 1900s, up to the 1930s, his stories have a Victorian feel to them, slightly ponderous and academic. But, assuming a reader isn’t put off completely by this style of language, it builds very nicely. His fusty language would be a bad thing in a detective or science fiction story, but it works for ghost stories about men who move in a world of ancient writings, tombs and artifacts.

He believed the ghost should be evil, otherwise the story tends to shift from ghost story to fantasy. (The film Ghost is more a romantic fantasy than a ghost story.) A Christmas Carol is full of ghosts, but it’s not a ghostly horror story, although the opening, with the appearance of Marley, follows the form quite well. (Dickens could write scary ghost stories when he wanted to. His story The Signalman is a classic.)

James suggests writers should avoid technical explanations of how ghosts work. Many ghost stories fall into this trap. Too much explanation of how ghosts “work” turns the ghost story into science fiction. You see the same storytelling effect in a film like Ghostbusters – teeming with ghosts, but not deeply frightening because these are ghosts that can be caught with lasers and contained with bottles. An interesting counterexample was a 1972 BBC production of by Nigel Kneale’s The Stone Tape. It seems to offer a scientific explanation of ghosts as a harmless psychic recording in the stone, then cleverly undermines it by suggesting the presence of something more horrible and mysterious, moving the narrative back into the realm of the ghost story.

Ghosts need mystery and obscurity to work well.

…the greatest successes have been scored by the authors who can make us envisage a definite time and place, and give us plenty of clear-cut and matter-of-fact detail, but who, when the climax is reached, allow us to be just a little in the dark as to the working of their machinery. We do not want to see the bones of their theory about the supernatural.

Ghosts that are overly active also become less ghostly. James describes one story, from another writer, about ghosts that played tricks with the victim’s bed, squirted water, threw torches into his room, stole his clothes. James comments that they sound more like goblins than ghosts.

M.R. James considered the writer J.S. Le Fanu to be one of the best ghost story writers – especially the slow pace of Le Fanu’s stories. He used the same style himself. James’s own stories develop very slowly.

After we’ve met the characters in the course of their normal lives, the atmosphere changes as something evil enters the story, first with hints and apprehensions, then building to a horrible peak.

There is the touch on the shoulder that comes when you are walking quickly homewards in the dark hours, full of anticipation of the warm room and bright fire, and when you pull up, startled, what face or no-face do you see?

He also disliked the addition of sex to a ghost story, and felt it spoiled the story. Again, he may have had some personal motives here. (As a counterexample, the 1981 film Ghost Story mixed ghosts and sex quite effectively.)

He distinguishes between stories that use horror and stories that are merely nauseating. This is another easy trap to fall into. As he notes, it is much easier to be nauseating, wallowing in images of rotting flesh. But a little gore goes a long way. (In movies, you see a similar distinction between horror built with suspense and horror that comes from gruesome special effects.) The ghost story, like all stories, emerges from the context of a world. The main task for the author isn’t to create horrific events, but to build up the world in a way that makes those events seem plausible, and therefore horrific.

I watched Rocky again the other night. It’s been a few years since I last saw the film, and I was trying to remember how it takes before Rocky gets the offer to fight Apollo Creed. This offer is the change that starts the real story of the movie. We’ve met Rocky. He’s a “might-have-been” boxer in a slow decline, who works as a collector for a loan shark. And suddenly he gets this big chance, which sets off the parts of the movie most people remember – the raw eggs, the training, “Getting strong now.”

The movie is about two hours long. If you were to follow the conventional wisdom, there should be about 30 minutes of introduction before that big “inciting incident.” So, for thirty minutes, we get to know Rocky. He has heart, but he doesn’t try too hard. He works for a loan shark but he can’t bring himself to break a guy’s thumbs. He’s been demoted from having a regular locker to having his gear in a bag on the wall. He missed his chance to be a good boxer. And then comes the big moment – “Rocky – you’re going to fight Apollo Creed.” And his life changes and the story starts.

Well, the movie seems like it’s going to follows this pattern. At around the 32 minute mark, Apollo Creed picks Rocky’s name from the Big Book of Boxers. But Rocky doesn’t know this, so it has no effect at all on his character. In fact, after this huge revelation, the story chugs along for another twenty minutes with more sweet scenes from Rocky’s pathetic life. It’s mostly about Rocky and Adrian. She argues with her brother. She has a date with Rocky. They skate. They go back to his place. They kiss and presumably have sex on the dirty floor.

In fact, we’re halfway into the film, around the 56 minute mark, before Rocky discovers that Apollo Creed has selected him as an opponent. That’s a very long introduction. Too long.  But the movie works. It’s amazing.

That’s not the only oddity with Rocky. For example, that romance with Adrian. He finally gets to go out with her halfway through the movie, and that’s pretty much the end of it. She loves him, she loves him… her  clothes sense improves, she can speak above a whisper, she stops needing glasses, and the relationship moves forward without a hitch.

Some people say “Rocky isn’t a boxing story. It’s a love story.” The original poster makes it look that way. And the film ends with him calling his girlfriend’s name… “Adrian!” It certainly could have been a love story. But it isn’t one.

For example, remember that moment when Rocky has been knocked down, and Burgess Meredith is saying, “Down! Down! Stay down!” Then Adrian enters the arena, and sees Rocky struggling up there, and she can hardly look. And what happens…?

What would happen in a love story is that he’s about to give up, but he sees her, and he sees the love in her eyes, and the pain as she realizes that he’s been beaten, and that he’s going back to obscurity, because they’re both sad losers… and because he loves her, he’s inspired… he gets to his feet… and he finishes that fight…

But no. Adrian is just there as an observer and an admirer. Rocky get to his feet on his own and finishes the fight on his own. This is a story about Rocky, not a story about Rocky and Adrian. Not a love story.

Rocky was a huge hit – deservedly so – and many writing gurus have analyzed the film’s structure to show how it fits their favourite pattern. But actually, the film’s structure isn’t that great. It’s slow to get going, Rocky isn’t as active in making choices as he might be, and it misses a few opportunities. Early versions of the script had even bigger problems – apparently, the first version ended with Rocky throwing the big fight, quitting boxing and opening a pet store.

But the characters are great, and the film is packed with surprising little details that feel very real and help build up the plausibility of his world – Rocky putting on a big pair of glasses before he makes notes in his book, the beleaguered loan shark trying to manage his bickering henchmen. And the emotional beats of the film work well – Rocky is a naive, sensitive character who reacts strongly to everything that goes on around him, and that makes him appealing. The story works in spite of its structure, not because of it.

Many rules of writing are not helpful to the writer. (I’ve always hated “A story has a beginning, a middle, and an end.”) But one story rule I have often found genuinely helpful when I’m trying to invent a story, is this one:

“An appealing character struggles against incredible obstacles to achieve a worthwhile goal.”

I call it the COG rule. Character-Obstacles-Goal.

I’ve been wondering where this rule came from. People claim it’s an “old rule” – but writers are often careless when it comes to citing ideas about writing. If it’s old, it certainly doesn’t seem to have a long history in print, but there are many versions

Here’s a vanilla version:

“A sympathetic character overcomes obstacles to reach a worthwhile goal” ¹Connecticut Review, Volumes 5-6 (Board of Trustees for Connecticut State Colleges, 1971), 10

Sometimes the problems are ramped up:

“An attractive protagonist (hero or heroine) overcomes great adversity to achieve a worthwhile goal.”²Stephen M. Archer, ‎Cynthia M. Gendrich, ‎Woodrow B. Hood, Theatre: Its Art and Craft (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc, 2010), 93

Obstacles often become odds:

“An appealing character strives against great odds to attain a worthwhile goal”³Doris Ricker Marston, A Guide to Writing History (Michigan: Writer’s Digest, 1976), 176

And the odds can also be intensified:

“A likable character overcomes almost insuperable odds and by his or her own efforts achieves a worthwhile goal.”⁴Marion Zimmer Bradley, “What is a Short Story” accessed 28 August 2016, Marion Zimmer Bradley Literary Works Trust, http://www.mzbworks.com/what.htm

Marion Zimmer Bradley’s version is particularly interesting. In her role as an editor of other people’s fiction, she’d obviously felt some frustration at the deluge of bad writing she had to deal with. Her addition of the words “by his or her own efforts” seems almost redundant – if a character is overcoming tremendous odds, it seems obvious that it should be by his or her own efforts, but even the writer who has gone to the trouble of creating a fascinating character, and given them a great goal and forbidding obstacles is still likely to throw the hero a magic helper or easy solution.

The fact that “by his or her own efforts” needs to be emphasized shows how powerfully the average author is pulled away from the very choices that will make the story a success. There’s an instinct to sabotage it, to lower the tension, and to make the story safer and duller.

We have an instinct to be entranced by stories, and we seem to have a matching instinct not to entrance others. Telling good stories is much harder that it should be.

Overpopulation is a common problem in storytelling.

Here’s what happens. You have a main character, who’s trying to achieve some high-minded goal. But he’s a little… I dunno… boring? But you say to yourself, that’s okay because that’s just what a hero is like, right? He’s an “everyman” so that’s why he’s a chore to write.

The hero meets other characters – local eccentrics, perhaps. You love these characters. They’re so interesting. Almost (although you hate to admit it) more interesting than the main character. So they come along for the ride.

Maybe the hero meets a scowling enemy, who was supposed to be an obstacle. With the help of his friends, the hero overcomes this enemy, but you love this crusty bad guy. So the enemy joins the troupe.

Before you know it, your hero is part of an ensemble of characters. When the hero runs into trouble, his entourage can help out, tell the hero what to do, provide material assistance, pass a potion, hack a mainframe, clonk the villain on the back of the head with a frying pan.

They’re filled to the brim with eccentricity and quirk. Everyone says, “What wonderful characters! Although the story seem unfocused somehow…”

Your story has lost its way. You started with a character who had challenges and enemies. Now the challenges have been made easy, the enemies have been won over, and the main character has become an object that his more-lively troupe carry along.

Don’t get me wrong. Some stories can work as an ensemble piece. In TV, The Mary Tyler Moore Show was an ensemble comedy that remained firmly centred around the “normal” Mary Richards. But this “Centre and Eccentrics” structure is a hard trick to pull off, and you need to work hard to keep your main character in the thick of things. When the same production company followed the same strategy in WKRP in Cincinnati, the person who was supposed to be the central character, Andy Travis, seemed to fade in the light of his quirky co-workers.

The temptation to increase a story’s population is very powerful, and once you’ve added characters, it can be hard to remove them. You see this problem even in some very successful books. The Harry Potter series has a bad habit of surrounding its main character with helpful assistants. The story remains on Harry long enough to keep things moving, but the main character becomes steadily less interesting as the series progresses.

It also seemed to be a problem in Lord of the Rings. In one letter from 1944, Tolkien admits that his gardener sidekick, Sam Gamgee, is more interesting than his hero, Frodo: “Certainly Sam is the most closely drawn character, the successor to Bilbo of the first book, the genuine hobbit. Frodo is not so interesting, because he has to be highminded… The book will probably end up with Sam.” Tolkien knows how to tell a story, and keeps Frodo on track, but it takes a toll. At the end of the novel, Frodo is sick of life, but it feels more like Tolkien is sick of Frodo.

Overpopulation is a symptom of problems with the main character. Your hero must be determined, driven, interesting. If your main character starts to feel like an “everyman” (whatever that is!), then make improvements so he or she is more interesting to you. Add facets to make your hero a more interesting gemstone. Don’t try to liven up a drab hero by surrounding them with brighter jewels.

When you’ve created a lovable hero, you’re going to have a hard time giving them a hard time. Be a sadist! Put your hero through the grinder. When the situation is bad, don’t give them a helper – give them another problem that makes things even worse. And then figure out some unexpected, but plausible way the hero finds a solution on their own efforts. (Any good solution will take time to invent, and it will seem impossible at first, but you’ll figure out something!) That way, the hero stays admirable, likeable and interesting.

And your story won’t buckle under the weight of a dozen main characters.